ARM Stressed in Server Bid

SAN JOSE, Calif. — ARM-based servers are coming, but even more slowly and perhaps more narrowly than once thought, according to companies that expect to build and use them.

"There will definitely be [ARM] server products shipping this year and a reasonable number next year, but it won't really begin to ramp until 2016," Forrest Norrod, general manager of Dell Inc.'s server group, told EE Times.

There's still plenty of work ahead to bring to ARM the wealth of server software that exists for the Intel x86, said Norrod and Wu Peng, a chief technologist for the datacenter group at the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. For example, Microsoft has yet to commit to supporting ARM with Windows Server.